Hope for Your Homeschool: Beating the Winter Blues

After the fun of Christmas is over and winter break comes to an end, are you experiencing the winter blues?  I hear you!  It can be hard to find the energy to get our school routine going again and not just for the kids, but for the homeschool parent, too!  Here are ten tips for going back to school in January.

1.  Start slow - start with a few subjects and layer in more things over time. 
   
2. Go outside - yes, it's freezing, but the kids don't care, so bundle them up and encourage them to get outdoors each day to move their bodies and if you join them, you might feel better, too!
   
3.  Enjoy the coziness of winter - start a fire in the fireplace or light some candles on your table at breakfast, it warms the dark, cold days of winter.
4. Snow days - you can do some homeschool necessities, but still take time to go play in the snow. 
5. Snacks - snacks have been a part of our home school in every season, but in winter it can be fun to have some hot cocoa and a small treat.
6. Winter themed books - When the kids were small, we enjoyed Jan Brett's The Mitten and many of her other beautifully illustrated books.  Older children could enjoy stories read aloud like the wintry tales of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods.
7. Games - winter is a nice time to pull out some fun board games to use during the dark evenings we have played Monopoly, Scrabble, Sorry, Quirkle, and Uno for fun.
8. Music - Listen to music together in the evenings after supper, especially if any of you play instruments.
   
9. Movies - Pop some popcorn and choose some movies that you can all watch together and talk about afterward.
   
10. Routine - establishing a simple morning routine can help to get everyone going each day.  A typical routine for our homeschool mornings was breakfast and reading aloud at the table, get dressed and ready for the day, and then start with a few minutes of handwriting practice at our table.  We did this each day for many years and it was nice that the kids knew what was expected while I was getting my own chores done in the morning. 

What are some of your favorite ways to beat the winter blues? Feel free to share in the comments below!

Stay at Home 2020 Tip #2: Build a Routine

Setting up a routine can help everyone who is stuck at home right now during the COVID-19 crisis.  Routines bring some comfort and help us to get things done.  When I get into a routine, it helps me feel "normal" and I don't have to worry about making decisions on some of the things I just do automatically in my routine. 

Schedules are different.  It's not bad to think about how much time certain activities take and when they fit best into your day, but if you are trying to get your kids to stick to a hard and fast schedule with a specific time for each activity throughout your day while you are all at home all the time, it might cause undue stress.  Don't feel like you need to recreate the school schedule that your children once had.  The schools needs schedules because they are organizing and coordinating large numbers of students, teachers, administrators, custodians, and other workers into each day.  They are moving around hundreds of people, but you are only coordinating one family. 

You can set up a routine for your family!  We naturally plan days around meals, even when kids are in school, so that's a great place to start.  In our 14 years of home education, we have had routines that work around meal times, too.  Everyone needs to eat!  Routines can be a list of things that happen in a certain order, but don't have to have a designated time.

For many years, the kids and I generally followed this routine (you do not need to re-create it, this it just to give you ideas that might be helpful):

• Everyone gets up, has some time to themselves
• I fix breakfast
• Kids eat breakfast with me at the kitchen table
• I do some reading aloud while they eat
• I clean up the kitchen, while they go get dressed and ready for the day
• I get a quick shower, get dressed, put on makeup and shoes
• I start a load of laundry
• We begin working on school work

We generally try to start school by 9:30 or 10 and work until lunch time, usually around 12pm, but again, that is really "scheduling".  However, I thought it might help to give you a ball park idea of time. For the chunks of "school time" we would also get into a rhythm or routine, but it would look a little different each year, depending on the age of my kids and what we are working on at that time.  When they were young and in elementary school, for several years, it would look something like this:

• Copywork at your desk or we work on handwriting all together
• Morning meeting where we looked at a big calendar, practiced memory work, and maybe sang a song
• Read aloud time - I read aloud books that might include great literature, history, science, music, poetry, art or even math stories, a few different books in one sitting, while the kids did something quiet like play with Legos, draw, or stuffed animals
• Snack time (see, there's another meal!)
• Math work
• Lunch time

We almost always took a full hour for a lunch break, so when the kids were done eating lunch, they could play outside or inside and have "free time".  I also cleaned up in the kitchen and moved the washed laundry to the dryer and usually started a second load.  I would also try to take a few minutes to do something else like make a phone call, plan errands I needed to run, go outside and play with the dogs for a few minutes or check email.

Our afternoon routine would usually include:

• Individual time with each child working on reading and spelling, I would give them something to do while I worked with the other one when they were small, and as they got older, I would have one of them do independent reading while I worked with the other child.
• English and language arts together
• Afternoon snack
• Play outside

Usually, that would cover everything and then in the afternoon, I would try to get errands, grocery shopping, and other things done like putting away the laundry before I needed to start supper.

This is just one way to build a routine, the combinations are truly endless!  Find a few priorities for your family and starting building a routine around them, if you haven't already.  What makes a routine work for you?